A Cook's Tour (25 page)

     In old-school
chanko
cuisine, four-legged creatures were rarely served, the idea being that sumo wrestlers who use all four limbs during a fight have lost the fight. Chicken – which stand on two feet, like a good wrestler – and fish were the preferred main ingredients. Mr Tomotsuna was making a soup of tuna and vegetables for lunch the day I visited – a fairly sensible choice for Calista Flockhart, I thought, but hardly the bulk-inducing pigfest I’d imagined. I’d have to wait until dinner to find out more.

     The Edosawa restaurant in the sumo district is a four-story place where customers eat in private dining rooms. The walls are decorated with paintings of famous wrestlers, and the restaurant attracts a steady crowd of sumo wrestlers and former sumo wrestlers. Michiko, Shinji, and I sat down in a top-floor room, with a simmering hot pot in the center of the table. Mr Matsuoka, the owner, prepared our meal personally. Sumo wrestlers, I discovered, don’t just eat that one bowl of soup, as I’d seen them do earlier at the stable. They eat often. They sleep in between meals, and the meal is a delicious multistage operation. Essentially, we had a
nabe
– a big pot of broth into which a procession of ingredients were fed and removed, replaced by other ingredients. Platter after platter of vegetables, meatballs, pork, fish, shellfish, and tofu arrived and were added slowly to the pot – according to cooking time – then transferred to our plates and consumed. The liquid was replenished from time to time as it cooked down or was ladled out, the added flavors growing more assertive over time. The less strongly flavored ingredients went in first; then, over time, things like anchovy paste were introduced.

     It was a lot of fun. I’d never seen Michiko and Shinji enjoy themselves so much. It’s a family-type thing, cooking
nabe
style, explained Michiko. At her family home, relatives might show up for a
nabe
meal with different ingredients – each relative bringing something – and the adding and removing and serving is casual and fun, like a fondue party. Fooled by the soup I’d seen at the stable, I ate with gusto early on, not prepared for the arrival of more and more plates of raw ingredients, scarfing up scallops and pork and tasty little meatballs with plenty of the hot spicy broth. Soon full, I was taken aback by the traditional ending to a
chanko
meal – the addition to the remaining broth of cooked rice and beaten egg, a mixture that quickly becomes a delicious but absolutely cementlike porridge. I groaned with apprehension as Mr Matsuoka ladled out generous portions of tasty gruel, but I soldiered on, my belly straining. When the meal was over, I needed help to get up. I was the first to exit the room, and as I painfully staggered down the hall, a door slid open across the way and a large party of about a dozen well-fed and slightly drunk businessmen came tumbling out. One of them looked at me with a surprised expression of recognition. He was one of the guys I’d gotten hammered with at the yakitori joint a week earlier. The last time I’d seen him, he’d been fast asleep in his chair, his face resting on the table.

     ‘Bourdain-san!’ he cried excitedly. ‘You crazy man chef! Where you go? What you eat next?’

Road to Pailin

I was going to the worst place on earth.

     The heart of darkness.

     ‘But what are you going to do in Cambodia?’ asked the television executive, when I mentioned my destination. Not a bad question as we were, presumably, making a food show.

     I had no idea.

     ‘You should go to this place I heard about,’ said the TV guy, excitedly. ‘A war correspondent I know told me about it. It’s this town in Cambodia, Pailin; it’s in the middle of nowhere, all the way up by the Thai border. Almost no Westerners have been there. It’s a Khmer Rouge stronghold. It’s where they still live. It’s the end of the world. You’ll love it. It’s rich in gems; the streets are supposed to be littered with uncut rubies and sapphires, which is why the Khmer Rouge like it. And get this: The Khmer Rouge is in the casino business now!’

     Casinos? Run by the most vicious, hard-core Commie mass murderers in history? Well, why not check it out? I thought. Satan’s Vegas: lounge acts, strippers, maybe a few new casinos surrounded by razor wire and militia. A town where anything would be possible. Lawless. A little dangerous. I liked the idea. The last outpost for international adventurers, spies, speculators, smugglers, mercenaries, and lovers of vast reasonably priced buffets. Sounded good to me. The cutting edge of extreme cuisine. What could the Khmer Rouge be serving to the legions of degenerate gamblers who were no doubt pouring into their former stronghold? What were their plans for the development of tourism? How were they reconciling their formerly stated hopes for a Stone Age agrarian Maoist Valhalla with the logistical necessities and showbiz glitter of running a profitable casino?

     Uncharacteristically, I read the small section in the Lonely Planet guide on Pailin:

Pailin occupies a curious position as a semi-autonomous zone in which leaders of the former Khmer Rouge can seek haven, avoiding the long arm of international law. There is little of interest to the tourist here, unless you know a bit about gemstones or like hanging out with geriatrics responsible for mass murder. It is indeed ironic that this one time Khmer Rouge model town is these days a center of vice and gambling.

     ‘Vice’? ‘Gambling’? This was going to be the kind of lusty adventure I’d read about in
Terry and the Pirates
as a kid! Roadblocks. Sinister guys with automatic weapons. A heart-shaped water bed in some Maoist version of Trump Castle. Even if it was a little rustic, how bad could it be? When Bugsy Siegel built the Flamingo in Vegas, things were still pretty rough out there. This could be fun!

I flew Air Vietnam into Phnom Penh. At Pochentong Airport, a long desk of uniformed military men examined my passport, documents, medical certificate, and visas. All of them were in full parade regalia: leather-billed hats, mortarboards with tassels on their shoulders, chests festooned with medals. It looked like the Joint Chiefs had gathered to personally inspect every incoming visitor. The first guy gravely scrutinized my papers, handed them to the officer on his right, who read closely, made a tiny written notation, then handed them to the man on his right, who stamped them and returned them to the first guy – where the whole process began again. My papers made it all the way down to the last guy. Then, after some tiny incongruity was noticed, they were returned, once again, to the beginning of the line. Eventually, my documents made it through this ludicrously overdressed gauntlet and I was in. Welcome to Cambodia. This is the last law you’ll see.

     Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia – the fruits of his genius for statesmanship – and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to Milošević. While Henry continues to nibble nori rolls and
remaki
at A-list parties, Cambodia, the neutral nation he secretly and illegally bombed, invaded, undermined, and then threw to the dogs, is still trying to raise itself up on its one remaining leg.

One in eight Cambodians – as many as 2 million people – were killed during the Khmer Rouge’s campaign to eradicate their country’s history. One out of every 250 Cambodians is missing a limb, crippled by one of the thousands and thousands of land mines still waiting to be stepped on in the country’s roads, fields, forests, and irrigation ditches. Destabilized, bombed, invaded, forced into slave labor, murdered by the thousands, the Cambodians must have been relieved when the Vietnamese, Cambodia’s historical archenemy, invaded.

     One look at the abject squalor of the capital city’s crumbling and unpaved streets and any thought that Cambodia might be fun flew out the window. If you’re a previously unemployable ex-convenience store clerk from Leeds or Tulsa, however, a guy with no conscience and no chance of ever knowing the love of an unintoxicated woman, then Cambodia can be a paradise. You can get a job as an English teacher for about seven dollars an hour (which makes you one of the richest people in the country). Weed, smack, whores, guns, and prescription drugs are cheap and easy to find. You can behave as badly as you wish. Shy boys on motorbikes will ferry you from bar to bar, waiting outside while you drink yourself into a stupor. You can eat dinner, then penetrate indentured underaged prostitutes, buy a kilo of not very good weed, drink yourself stuttering drunk, and be driven safely home to your spacious apartment – all for under thirty dollars. Cambodia is a dream come true for international losers – a beautiful but badly beaten woman, staked out on an anthill for every predator in the world to do with what he wishes.

     Phnom Penh’s total population when the Khmer Rouge finished marching its citizens out into the countryside to dig irrigation ditches – and executing most of them – was a mind-boggling twelve people. That’s down from about 850,000 only a couple of years earlier. Most of the survivors returned to the city, to find their former homes in shambles; looted, waterless, powerless hovels, often occupied by equally desperate squatters. Armless, legless, limping, and crawling locals struggle still to scratch out a living making handicrafts for tourists. Or begging. The average wage in Cambodia is under a dollar a day. Four-year old children wander the markets, begging, carrying their two-year-old brothers.

     Where does one go in Phnom Penh? Just where you’d think the expats would go: The FCC (Foreign Correspondents Club), where you can have an American-style hamburger, and a cold beer, then retire to the rear balcony to watch the bats leaving the eaves of the National Museum at dusk – a nightly event where a stream of thousands and thousands of bats curls out and up into the purple-and-gold sky like fast-moving smoke. Then you can stumble into the street, where a crowd of skinny, underweight boys on scooters and motos wait, no doubt calling your name – as they know you and your predilections by now – brush by a few amputees, hop on the back of one of the boys’ motos, and head off to ‘the Heart’, local shorthand for the Heart of Darkness Bar. After that, there are the nightclubs and brothels (a narrow distinction between the two), maybe some pizza seasoned with ganja, a bag of smack for a nightcap. With any luck, your Cambodian-made condom won’t snap, you won’t get rousted or shot at by the cops, and you won’t run into any relatives of Hun Sen, the prime minister – any of which might lead to tragedy. If you do get into trouble, don’t look to the law to help you out.

     A story from the
Phnom Penh Post
:

Tha Sokha, 19, tried for the rape of a six-year-old girl, will serve only six months in jail for indecent assault because the rape of his victim ‘was not deep enough’ said Kandal Court Judge Kong Kouy . . . After initially ignoring the girl’s family’s complaints against Sokha, district police brokered a compensation deal between the families of the victim and the perpetrator. The girl’s parents thumbprinted a contract in which they would receive 1.5 million riel in compensation for the rape of their daughter, but they never received the money. Upon taking the case to the commune police station on Jan. 11, the victim and her sister reported receiving death threats from a commune police officer named Lon if they continued to ‘talk about rape.’

     Another typical story from the
Phnom Penh Post
– same day as the above:

Acid Mutilation a Misdemeanor: The first case of a viciously mutilated acid attack victim pressing charges against her assailant has shocked legal observers by resulting in a two-year suspended sentence against the suspect. Kampong Cham Municipal Court Judge Tith Sothy dismissed a petition to upgrade the charges . . . Sothy justified the ruling on the grounds that [the perpetrator] had no intention of killing the victim but only sought to ‘damage her beauty because of jealousy.’

     Getting the picture? So who is in charge? Hard to say. The easy answer is Hun Sen, the former Khmer Rouge officer who defected to the Vietnamese and then was ‘elected’ prime minister, ousting his nominal competition by coup d’état. There’s King Sihanouk, back again, installed in the palace after playing footsie with the United States, the Khmer Rouge, the Chinese – and everybody else. He provides a thin veneer of legitimacy and tradition to what is essentially a military dictatorship. There are the remnants of the Khmer Rouge and its allies – a loosely knit coalition of convenience among various unlovely private armies, organized criminals, former Vietnamese stooges, and extremist groups. The Khmer Rouge ‘defected’ to the ‘central government’ (such as it is), awhile back, in return for amnesty, and was basically given control of its former stronghold and cash cow in northern Cambodia, free to pursue its traditional pastimes of gem smuggling and lumbering – and its new gambling ventures. Those in the Khmer Rouge were given central government uniforms when they put down their guns, which means that nearly every male Cambodian of draft age, it seems, wears the same fatigues in one form or another, making it difficult to tell exactly who is robbing and extorting you on any given day. There are the much-feared private armies (everybody’s got one), which act mainly as security for various despotic scuzzballs and their relatives – with attendant hit men – making it a dangerous matter if some drunken lout steps on your toe in a nightclub and you voice your displeasure too expressively.